An article from Do or Die Issue 8. In the
paper edition, this article appears on page(s)
133-136.

No Rent, No Government

Stories of Squatting

Ever since property was established, vast numbers of people have ended up
without a fair share and often, without a home. And ever since, vast numbers of
people have discovered empty properties, be it land, huts, houses or castles,
and decided to settle there, even if obviously not invited to. That's what
squatting basically is - using a disused space. Most visibly in this century,
squatting has been the basis of social movements. Individuals and groups have
turned squatting into a political statement, engaged collectively in struggles
against landlords, councils and the state, and have consciously created
autonomous zones and defended them.

Imagine England after the Second World War - total devastation, food
shortages and lots of weary disillusioned foot soldiers returning to this after
years of bombings and blackouts. Many were trying to start families but there
was a massive housing shortage. Seeing landlords keeping properties unoccupied,
many decided to squat, often with the help of 'Vigilante' self-help groups on
the south coast and in the large cities - the idea of direct action for homes
began to spread.

In 1946, when homelessness was at unprecedented heights in the UK, a family
moved into the officers' mess of an unoccupied army camp near Scunthorpe. The
news got round quickly and other families joined, and more and more camps were
taken over - in the course of a few months, 45,000 people were thought to be
living at 1,000 sites. The camps were large and makeshift but the spirit of DIY
took hold. The News Chronicle (20/8/46) quoted a squatter as saying: "Only a few
days passed before the chaos started to sort itself out. Subcommittees were
established for health, social activities, construction work and camp amenities.
A communal kitchen is operating and there is a clinic where the services of a
local health visitor are available. Plans are now being considered for a co-op
shop. There is an almost palpable feeling of freedom, of having emerged into
wider life than had ever been thought possible."

Obviously, the camps were harassed by local authorities, but there was often
huge local support, flocking to defend the squats, and the government didn't
really know how to handle the situation. They finally opted to leave the
families, passing management over to the local councils who would collect rent
and rates.

The squatting continued though, with high profile mass takeovers of luxury
flats and empty hotels in London to protest against housing policies. Organised
workers went on strike in support of the occupations. But this movement quickly
lost its basis, through a vicious media campaign and the alienation and various
fuckups caused by Communist Party involvement, so the squatters retreated.

Squatting remained popular in the UK - in 1975, for example, 200-300 houses
were squatted in Bristol, 150 in Brighton, 130 in Manchester and 100 in
Leicester, to name but a few towns. A 1977 survey revealed 1,850 squats in
London (according to Squatting: the Real Story, p.231).

[IMAGE] Squatted army huts at Stratford, 1946

Amsterdam and Berlin seem to have been very cool places to be, too. In 1980,
authorities estimated that there were 6,000-7,000 squats in Amsterdam alone.
There was also a time in Kreuzberg, a poor Berlin district, when houses were
squatted at a rate of one a day.

You'd find squat bars, workshops, women-only squats, co-op stores, a city
farm, DIY healthcentres, creches and alternative schools, infocentres,
printshops, pirate radio stations, cafes, advice drop-ins, even a cinema (in
Berlin) - a functioning infrastructure for the various neighbourhoods that
developed. This proved useful for summoning the crowds to defend the autonomous
zones. If word got round that a large squat was threatened with eviction,
everyone would come. The crowd unleashed its uncontrollable dynamic and you can
feel, reading the accounts, the exhilaration of being able to fight off scores
of riot police or the victory of re-squatting a building. Tactics were focused
around these large numbers. Barricades were erected in the streets
(strategically placed or spontaneous), houses were fortified with everything
from welded steel sheets and barbed wire to anti-tear gas curtains, ammunition
was stockpiled, and weak points in the police presence attacked, e.g. their
vehicles.

[IMAGE] Converted skips full of armed cops are lowered on to the roofs in
Amsterdam, 1980.

Christiania was the name given to a 54-acre squat near the centre of
Copenhagen, Denmark. It used to be a naval barracks until abandoned in 1970, and
was soon taken over by squatters. The area includes large barrack blocks and
halls, small huts, a beautiful lake, and trees and grass were planted. A long
term autonomous zone, it obviously faced internal disappointments and
difficulties. In his autobiography I Couldn't Paint Golden Angels, the anarchist
Albert Meltzer dismissed it as "...a dropout's utopia. They made and sold
handicrafts, lived and worked communally and so long as they stayed within
bounds could smoke pot freely. Big deal." (p.346). But the defence plan the
squatters devised when facing eviction in 1976 was even described by a former
chief of the NATO Defence College in Rome as sound, extraordinarily intelligent
and strategically well-thought through. It involved sirens and a sophisticated
telephone network alarming people, physically blockading Copenhagen's bridges,
railtracks and airport runways, bonfires in the streets, traffic disruption,
pirate radio interference with local stations, and taxis being asked to converge
on Christiania. Considering that a demonstration in support of the squatters had
drawn 30,000 people, it certainly seemed feasible at least in numbers. The
government backed down before this was tried, though, and allowed Christiania to
remain.

As to tactics in Holland, the book Cracking the Movement by Adilkno points
out, "The squatters discovered the three central principles of fortification
formulated by Marshal Vauban at the end of the 17th century and put them into
practice. Vauban proposed that defence should take place on a number of lines
placed behind the other; that the particular characteristics of the place should
be employed in entrenchment and the eventuality of sorties (counterattacks); and
that an imbalance should be created between entrance and exit - it must be
difficult to get in and easy to get out." (p.49) The strategies of offensive
resistance were also carried into campaigns against various unwanted
neighbourhood developments. Buildings were squatted and often successfully
defended on the route of proposed roads, hotels and offices which would demolish
low-cost housing. In both Holland and Germany, actions were carried out
constantly, often in retaliation, e.g. after most of the frequent raids on
Berlin squats, some bank window or the council buildings would be trashed.

The squatters were organising themselves, for example in the SOK, the
Amsterdam squatters council, or through the Berlin weekly newsletter
BesetzerPost which had a print-run of 5,000.

Squatting wasn't just about housing, it was about making your life part of a
wider political struggle. Solidarity was strong within what could be called an
anticapitalist movement. On the announcement of the death of an ex-Red Army
Faction member Sigmund Depus in 1980, the Berlin squat bars emptied into the
streets. This ended with 80% of the windows on the two mile long consumer
shrine, the Kudamm, being smashed. And during the British miners strike in 1984,
the Amsterdam support committee raised money and organised holidays for miners'
children from Derbyshire. "Some of them are sailing, others are at the anarchist
camp in Appelscha, and others live at squats with Dutch families for a week."
(Black Flag, Autumn 1984, p.5) But then again, squatting wasn't confined to
anarchists - a large tower block was squatted by a few hundred fascists in the
early '90s in Berlin!

Movements tend to reach a peak and then ebb. The reasons for this are always
varied and difficult to pinpoint. The activities of the squatters obviously
threatened the power of property speculators, developers and local councils.
Repression and brute force discouraged a few squatters, but strengthened the
determination of others. Many squats were offered negotiations for legalisation
by the respective town councils. This managed to divide the movement into those
willing to negotiate and those who weren't. It provoked discussions about
radicalness and quashed joint action. An analysis in Squatting in West Berlin
points out that, to a certain extent, both points of view have been verified by
events. Only the legalised houses were able to hold on to their free space, but
the confrontational movement was killed. The media did its best to influence the
course of things - misrepresenting and dividing the squatters into violent thugs
and peaceful young people.

[IMAGE] Barricades cleared after Dutch eviction, 1980

Especially in the Netherlands, what had once been a broad-based spontaneous
movement grew into an increasingly fragmented scene. People knew each other
well, hung out together, which is nice but as so often happens this turned into
an inward-looking subculture - not welcoming to the inexperienced newcomer.
Jargon and shared views or petty arguments developed which excluded outsiders.

These are only a few examples. The various squatting movements involved tens
of thousands of people over the years. They inspired self-organisation and
diverse uses of space, the occupation of empty houses as protest against housing
shortages or as resistance to unwanted urban developments, and the employment of
different tactics to defend the space, from barricading and sitting on roofs,
stocking up on ammunition and streetfighting, to drumming up local support. It
was the networking and solidarity between the squatters as well as their
determination that made all this possible.

(BOX) Practical Squatting

In England and Wales, squatting is not a crime.
Basically, if you can get into a building without causing any obvious criminal
damage and secure it, it's legally your home. You have the right to postal
delivery, services like electricity and gas, rubbish collection and privacy.
It's up to the owners to obtain a possession order and only then can you be
evicted. Even the infamous Criminal Justice Act of 1994 did not render squatting
illegal. The only difference is that now fast track evictions are possible under
specific circumstances - if there's someone unable to move in because you're
there, an Interim Possession Order (IPO) is issued.

1) Finding a place and getting in:

Have a stroll round the area you'd like to live in
and find an empty house (there are always loads). Make sure it's empty! Avoid
the obviously totally trashed places unless you like living without water or
electricity. Check out possible entrances - is that a wooden door that would be
easy to crowbar round the back, or are there only huge fuckoff firedoors? Is
that door only locked with a Yale you could slip? What about the windows - could
you slip the latches with a blunt flat knife? Even if the windows are boarded
up, they usually don't bother with first floor windows so they're do-able with a
ladder. When you're going out to crack a squat, go with a couple of mates. It
doesn't have to be in the dark of night when neighbours are actually more easily
alerted. Go only with the necessary equipment, well concealed, and try not to
look too dodgy as the police could stop you. You could get done on suspicion of
going equipped for breaking and entering.

2) Securing:

Once you're in, it's best to change the locks as soon
as possible - chisel the old ones out and replace with a new one of similar
size. The important thing is to make sure the owner can't just walk in and thus
repossess the building, so a few bolts could do the job at first, or even just
latching the Yale lock if there's one. You can put up a Legal Warning based on
Section 6 of the Criminal Law Act 1977, which can be helpful for dealing with
the police or owners.

3) Dealing with the police/owners:

The police have no legal right to enter a squat
unless they have a warrant. They can't really do much to you unless they
randomly decide you're very bad which is when they'll point out some spurious or
possibly blatant criminal damage or whatever and try to arrest you. However,
this doesn't happen often. Be firm but polite and explain through the letter box
or window that you're squatting, hand them a legal warning and point out that
the owner must go through the legal proceedings to evict you. The latter also
applies to dealing with the owner.

4) Making it home:

Move your stuff in. Don't leave the building
unattended especially if haven't had a police/owner visit yet. Register gas
and/or electricity (important if you don't want to be arrested on grounds of
'stealing electricity'). Turn on the water. Clean up. Try to get the neighbours
on your side by going round, being generally pleasant and explaining your
situation.

5) Legal proceedings:

If the owner's on the case s/he will take you to
Court, i.e. a Court Order will be delivered to your door. Get in touch with the
ASS (see 'Further Advice') who can help you decide if you have a case in Court
or if there's no use going. If the Court grants the owner a possession order,
the bailiffs will put it on their waiting list. You will get a notice for when
they're coming, or you can ring up the Sheriff's Office and find out. Unless you
desire the confrontation, move out and find another squat. All this should take
anything upwards of 3-4 weeks.

[IMAGE] ammunition

Further Advice:

These are just the basics - everything you need to
know can be found in the indispensable Squatters Handbook, available for £1
from the Advisory Service for Squatters (ASS). The ASS have gained experience
over the last 20 years. They're the ones who'll decipher the legal terms on the
Court papers for you and guide you through Court and squatting in general.